I had spaghetti for dinner tonight, which means I was sitting around thinking, “Dear god why did I eat so much,” when a friend’s dad called. His step-daughter was playing host to a couple of little girls from Japan and no one spoke Japanese. They had a English-to-Japanese translator gizmo, but the keys were labeled in Japanese, making it a bit useless. In any case, I spoke about three sentences to the kids who were perfectly happy playing around being kids. It was nice to see the step-daughter and her family; I hadn’t seen her in at least fifteen years because her son is now fifteen!

It’s all kind of strange, because my friend works in the next building at Intel, and I also house-sit for his dad about once every two years, and the stepsister/stepdaughter lives about two blocks from the dad’s house but I still haven’t run into her in years. She’s even a hairdresser like Megan.

In any case, that was my excitement for the day. That and the realization that I have TWO computers I can use to replace the one I’m supposed to give to Mr. Jr. Slab. Oh, plus that the ham radio swap meet is probably this weekend. Yeah, lots of opportunities to make myself even more attractive to the ladies: computers and ham radio.

So would you expect that rather than go to the gym I’d be drinking beer on a Tuesday at the beach? It was a quiet end to a day where my sister and I drove out to the beach for our friends’ grandfather’s funeral. I didn’t even know his name until last week, since they just called him Boppy.

After the funeral, several of us went to the pub down the street from the grandparents’ house and, for some reason, ate a bunch of salads. This means my lunch for the day was reception cookies and a green salad plus several beers. For those of you lucky enough to be in Oregon, you may know the effect of Terminal Gravity IPA. Fortunately, my sister doesn’t drink, so I let her drive the hour-and-a-half back  to Portland.

Coincidentally, the bar at the beach is owned by a old neighbor who went to grade school with us in Portland. He went to my high school as well. He always kind of had a crush on my little sister, but she’s pretty oblivious to things like that.